Additional Blogs by SAP
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
johna69
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Each year at SAP we are invited to give back to the community in the form of volunteer days. SAP is the only company I have worked for that offers this. However there is a very simple way of giving back to the community that is open to most of us. Schools in the US and UK (and I'm sure other countries too) have career days. This is an invitation from the local schools for you to talk to the students about your career and encourage them to make positive choices.

This year I presented at a local Elementary school in the suburbs of Washington DC. Most of the professionals were policemen and secret service. Of course the most popular were those that brought big toys, a real fire truck, police cars, a dump truck and handcuffs.
This of course makes it a challenge for a software engineer to engage the students. Given the other options open, I chose part of my presentation to be robocode .

Robocode is a great entry level to introduce students and children to programming. It comes with it own Java IDE that provides a framework and coding for controlling a robot in a game. Young children seem to love things with robots in them.

I explained to the 6 and 7 year olds in the room how the robot was controlled and what they needed to do to change it. I then invited them up to make changes and run the program to see if the changes they made moved the robot as expected.

Even for those of you that are not developers the code snippet below should be simple to follow:

    public void run() {
        // Initialization of the robot should be put here

        // Some color codes: blue, yellow, black, white, red, pink, brown, grey, orange...
        // Sets these colors (robot parts): body, gun, radar, bullet, scan_arc
        setColors(orange, blue, white, yellow, black);

        // Robot main loop
        while(true) {
            // Replace the next 4 lines with any behavior you would like
            ahead(100);
            turnGunRight(360);
            back(100);
            turnGunRight(360);
        }
    }

The students changed the colors and movement and got excited watching it go crazy when they executed the program they had wrote.

The biggest surprise I got was not during the day, but a few weeks later. I received an envelope with handwritten letters from the students that had liked my presentation the best. Being best obviously being a tough task when up against flashing blue lights, wailing sirens and stories about protecting the president. The majority of the letters were from girls and a few thanked me for describing my job as they now understood better what their parents did at work, but the real icing on the cake for me was "I mabey be an enganie when I grow up!" (sic).

 

Such simple things and such little time can help bring a positive influence.

11 Comments